urbanLab Magazin 2021 - Transformation

Fig. 3: The PAAD proposal is to bridge scientific and architecture
knowledge through people’s perceptions, passing over the languages
of other research areas, such acoustics. (Own illustration)
citizen’s participation processes for urban
planning are becoming common
in the recent years and in big cities, like
Barcelona, Amsterdam, Milan or bigger
areas like Oregon (US) or the UK. In those
cases, the opinion of the users and
inhabitants of future buildings have a
certain impact on the final design. It is
reasonable to develop a categorization
method which evaluates the opinions
of citizens on the spatial proposals. This
categorization would reveal the community
wishes and help into its translation
into architectural terms. Public
competitions constitute another field of
application of this categorization. There,
the jury composed by specialists and
institutions in front of several architectural
proposals would benefit from a set
of predictors which guarantee a certain
degree of satisfaction, sense of safety,
speech intelligibility, etc.
WHAT DO WE PROPOSE?
The techniques used for descriptive
sensory evaluation were already used
for food evaluation, tactile properties,
or medical disorders. Our hypothesis
is that the elaboration of a vocabulary
of architectural perception is possible
through the elicitation of judgements
from experts and non-experts. The
participants of the first TEST A – which
will be architects and users – will be
asked to personally judge several architectural
spaces, defining the terms
by relational operators (more than, not
equal to, etc.), by logical operators (and,
or, etc.) and opposite values (very big,
very small). In a next TEST B, the same
subjects will rank different architectural
environments based on the full collection
of terms. The results of that test will
provide a vocabulary weighted by the
personal profiles of the assessors. Up to
this first stage of the project, the vocabulary
and the judgements are ready to
be correlated with the architectural design
properties. This will lead to the second
stage of the project analysing the
space with objective metrics –connectivity
indexes, visibility graphs, Space
Syntax analysis, acoustic Room Impulse
Response properties, clarity and intelligibility
indexes of speech and music,
3D navigation, etc.- The parameters
correlating with the rated vocabulary
will be defined as predictors and, thus,
categorizing the architectural design.
This could be used as helping tools for
architects in future stages of the study.
HOW DO WE DO THIS?
We use Image-based photogrammetry
for 3D modelling of outdoor and indoor
architectural scenarios. With this
technique we develop our research in
automated 3D modelling with applications
in acoustic and visual simulations.
From point clouds generated by photographic
data, to texturized meshes
useful for immersive applications. The
technique is used for both outdoor and
indoor scenarios.
• Point cloud generation and management
provides powerful data for
3D capturing.
• The final model relies on triangulation
and texturization of meshes.
68 HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN